This January we launched a new and improved website. In June, we threw out our home page and redid it from scratch.

Sometimes, we get it wrong.

OK, maybe not “wrong” but not “good enough”. We regularly review the results from our website in our quest to keep improving web performance. In this article, I’m sharing with you our process for doing data-driven website reviews and a bit of a case study on how we used it to significantly increase results for us.Read More

A common mistake I see local businesses making when they look at their Google Analytics is that they look at their overall stats (number of visitors to their site, their bounce rate, how many pages were visited, etc.). While those numbers do have their place, the more relevant Analytic numbers to look at for a small business would be the stats for their local market.

What does “Bounce Rate” mean? One of the key indicators of how well your small business website is doing can be found in your Google Analytic’s “Bounce Rate”. Essentially, the bounce rate measures how many people went to a page on your website and just left; they didn’t do anything else.

Think of it this way: If your site has a Bounce Rate of 50%, half of everyone going to your website goes only to a single page.

Reducing Your Bounce Rate Is An Easy Way To Get A Lot More Customers

Let’s say your website is getting 300 unique visitors a month. With a Bounce Rate of 50%, that means 150 people are not engaging with your site; they’re just leaving. If you could bring your Bounce Rate down to 40% that’s an extra 30 people who are engaging with you through your site every month…an extra 360 people a year!

In the past we’ve relied on various methods to track website statistics: StatCounter, Google Analytics, Awstats and so on. Starting in June, we’ve standardized on Google Analytics as our preferred method of tracking and analyzing results on a website.

We picked Google Analytics for a number of reasons: (1) clear favourite of website professionals making it widely supported and documented, (2) user-friendly graphs and stats, (3) your stats keep compiling even if you swtich hosts, (4) they use Absolute Unique Vistiors (more on that later) and (5) sophisticated tools when you’re ready for advanced tracking.